In his lengthy and interesting blog post covering the future of Plasma, KDE's Aaron Seigo proposes Qt Quick and QML (a declarative language that embeds JavaScript) as replacement of the Graphics View architecture currently used by Plasma. This holds a promise of massive speedups and cheap effects as all paint operations become candidates for OpenGL acceleration, contrary to the aging Graphics View architecture that is still stuck with various inefficiencies caused by the underlying QPainter approach. Expressiveness and easy programmability of QML is a nice bonus, of course.

It´s the 4.0 fiasco all over again, the same was told back then "Look, Qt has QProxyGraphicsWidgetsWhatEver, you can rotate them, you can zoom out", but you can't actually use it, if the next two years are gonna be more try and error, then these guys haven't learned anything.